This volume,” says editor Mike Ashley of The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits, is “a celebration of Charles Dickens’s fascination with crime... When Dickens introduced Inspector Bucket in Bleak House in 1853, he created the first true fictional detective in England. He was modelled on a real police detective, Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Police Force. Dickens frequently accompanied the police on their duties, betraying a fascination beyond the simple research for his books.”

Each story has been especially written for this book, we are told, and takes as its starting point a character from one of the novels, or an event in Dickens's life. There is an enormously long list of Mammoth books on a variety of subjects — True Crime, Science Fiction, Space Exploration and Disasters, Women Who Kill, the World’s Greatest Chess Games and so on. Mike Ashley, who has edited the book on Dickensian whodunnits, is a writer and researcher, specialising in ancient history, historical fiction and fantasy, crime and science fiction.

Whatever happened to Mr Edward Murdstone, David Copperfield’s stepfather? Kate Ellis’s story, The Divine Nature, shows us the extent to which Murdstone takes his self-absorption, his megalomania. In the original novel, the first words we hear from him, when David meets him for the first time, and Clara, David’s mother, rises to greet him are, “Now, Clara my dear,” said Mr Murdstone, “Recollect! Control yourself, always control yourself.” He has set himself up as The Divine Nature, and he had a handful of gullible women followers.

Surprisingly, Miss Murdstone calls on David one day, and says her brother seems to have disappeared without a trace. Miss Murdstone implores him for help on the grounds they are related by marriage. “Related, ma’am?” The remark surprised me. She had never acknowledged kinship of any kind in all the years of our mutual acquaintance.” Some of the stories in the collection are based on events in Dickens’s own life, such as his year-long tour of the U S, which included cities such as Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and many others.

The story, Encounter in the Darkby F Gwynplaine MacIntyre, is about Dickens and Poe (1809-49) who met twice, reviewed each other’s work but had an uneasy relationship. Poe, who met Dickens in Philadelphia in 1842, hoped that Dickens would be “his ticket to fame.” But Dickens did not even mention Poe in his accounts of his travels, and later told Poe that no English publishers were interested in his work. Dickens’s friendship with the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1816- 1865) is explored in The Mystery of Canute Villa by Martin Edwards.

They first met, we are told, in 1849 when she attended a celebration dinner that Dickens held on the publication of David Copperfield. Dickens admired her work intensely, especially its exploration of the lower reaches of Victorian society. Certainly, her work should be better-known and more widely read than it is. In the story based on this friendship, the author writes: “Mrs Gaskell’s telegram had fascinated him. Within an hour of its receipt, he was on the train heading north to Manchester. He had an additional motive for racing to her side, being determined to seize an opportunity to improve relations between them.

Once they had been on first class terms, but ever since their wrangles over the serialisation of ‘North and South’, she had displayed a stubbornness unbecoming (if not, sadly, uncommon) in any woman, let alone the wife of a provincial clergyman. He smiled. “Do you remember why I used to call you Scheherezade?” She blushed. Not, he was sure, because her memory had failed, but rather from that becoming modesty that had entranced him in the early days of their acquaintance.”

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